Stupefication
by rotorviator
Summary: Oneshot, Renji narrates. Ichigo remains a mystery to all of them; but hell, he looks quite a sight while doing so.


**A/N: I own nothing except a strongly-held belief that Renji has a poetic soul. That is all. :D**

**Also, grovelling apologies for the annoying skipping between tenses. Forgive me, please. D:**

**Lemme know if you like it?**

..I was fucking _dazzled._

He turned from me with a faint smile, and the picture he made was almost too much. He stood on a precipice, his back to me, as night drew heavy over our world, but the slipping, flaming colours of sunset were smeared along the horizon and the breeze tugged at his hair. The sky was consuming and it consumed me wholly; it must have, because I couldn't move. I couldn't have ever moved. He was in a loose, torn shihakusho that left his bandaged chest bare, with sword at side and head tilted upwards.

He stood there, on the very edge. The cliff was blade-sharp and it skittered off perpendicular to a plummeting, spike-lined drop. He stood there and he understood everything around him. He knew the force with which gravity would crush him to the ground if he stepped forward and let it; he knew the brute whip of the wind and the beasts it would uproot; he knew the burning, monstrous inferno of the sun. He knew, and he accepted, and so he was allowed to understand.

Do you know what that's like? Do you see, what he could do? He could take on these powers, that were above and beyond anything we will ever be capable of hoping to dream to achieve, and he wasn't afraid. He wasn't fucking afraid. Or - he wasn't stupid, though. He knew what they were, but he saw them not as foes to fight and beat. He saw.. Damn. I'm not sure what he saw. He knows, and he knows clear in that weird head of his what he saw. Maybe, he just wanted something higher and purer. Something absolute. Something that made sense.

Something that made sense.

Point is; he could exist there, and exist also as part of these titans, these rulers that we could never hope to bend to our will, or call friends, or see into the souls of. But he stood and called to them, loudly, earnestly, honestly. Overwhelmingly, they replied, because they saw something of him that could be, in it's entirety, with them. He could know euphoria that came from knowledge and courage and strength and dignity and a thousand other things that people spend their entire long slow sad lives aiming for and that they would never achieve, and he cast the rest of us into dark, impenetrable shadow. We were powerless to do anything other than follow and aid, follow and aid, follow and aid and hope.

He stood there yet, and the wind picked up and howled throughout the barren plain and dragged itself over and between and beneath and within the jagged rocks. The sun hissed lower behind the horizon, but he was still alight. What could he see?

When it comes down to it, and even when it doesn't, he's very much capable of being one of us, in a way. He understands how he's supposed to act and what he's supposed to say, and he does his bit remarkably well. I'd say he even enjoys it, sometimes, feeling like he's almost a normal guy. He can play Ichigo like the role was written for him; which, really, I guess it was.

What would you do? How do you treat someone like this? What can you say, how can you act? The jealousy stemming from being so - so what? Inferior? Hell, some people are just born a little different. Or very different. Stunningly, terrifyingly different. Does his mind work a different way to ours? After everything he has done, and for everything he will do, we're not sure what to think. What can you think? Does he know the ache of being ostracised, does he get what it is to be brilliant and to be alone?

He isn't alone.

He has everyone here and everyone there, and everyone who he's come across in between. And every one of them will never forget his name. But does he consider himself alone? Surely, not being alone involves having people like you, near you, right, maybe? But who's like him? He thinks along different lines than we do. His mind travels (stalks? Whispers? Sprints?) along paths we don't catch and we don't get. He is undoubtedly the odd-one-out, the cat among the pigeons, lone rotating satellite in a black sky. Sometimes it falls into place. Sometimes we just, just.

Pray for him. We don't know who we're praying to, but what else can we do for him? He just wants everything to make sense. We wonder if he'll ever make sense to us. Do we make sense to him?

One thing I'm curious about, though, is - what does his face look like when he stands there? No-one ever sees.

The sky was clear, and aflame with a hundred-thousand tiny suns. They orbited the moon that hung there, suspended on a celestial string, an eternal timepiece. I left, after a while, because my head was full and aching and I wasn't sure if it was wise to stay there too long. It hurt to think. The view was blinding. I needed to forget, somehow.

(...Maybe no-one's _meant _to see.)


End file.
